Anatomy of the State

ANATOMY OF THE STATE ANATOMY OF THE STATE MURRAY N. ROTHBARD © 2009 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Ludwig von Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue Auburn, Alabama 36832 www.mises.org ISBN: 978-1-933550-48-0 The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism. Murray N. Rothbard CONTENTS What the State Is Not . .9 What the State Is . 13 How the State Preserves Itself . 18 How the State Transcends Its Limits . 30 What the State Fears . 44 How States Relate to One Another . 47 History as a Race Between State Power and Social Power . 53 Index . 56 7 WHAT THE STATE IS NOT he State is almost universally consid- ered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; oth- T ers regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the “private sector” and often winning in this compe- tition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sen- timents expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we Originally published in “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays” by Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55–88. 9 10 ANATOMY OF THE STATE are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “commit- ted suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree. We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.” The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people.1 But, even 1 We cannot, in this chapter, develop the many problems and fallacies of “democracy.” Suffice it to say here that an individual’s ANATOMY OF THE STATE 11 if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.2 No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that “we are all part of one another,” must be permit- ted to obscure this basic fact. If, then, the State is not “us,” if it is not “the human family” getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or coun- try club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods true agent or “representative” is always subject to that individual’s orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the “representative” in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions, the only ones consonant with a libertarian society. 2 Social democrats often retort that democracy—majority choice of rulers—logically implies that the majority must leave certain freedoms to the minority, for the minority might one day become the majority. Apart from other flaws, this argu- ment obviously does not hold where the minority cannot become the majority, for example, when the minority is of a different racial or ethnic group from the majority. 12 ANATOMY OF THE STATE and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayo- net.3 Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual sub- jects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activ- ity that elaboration is necessary. 3 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democ- racy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942), p. 198. The friction or antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that . the State has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the service of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind. Also see Murray N. Rothbard, “The Fallacy of the ‘Public Sec- tor,”’ New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): 3ff. WHAT THE STATE IS an is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in “capital”) into Mshapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources (“production”) and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. The only “natural” course for man to survive and to attain wealth, therefore, is by using his mind and energy to engage in the production-and-exchange process. He does 13 14 ANATOMY OF THE STATE this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by “mixing his labor” with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man’s nature, therefore, is the path of “property rights” and the “free market” of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the “jungle” methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange. The great German sociologist Franz Oppen- heimer pointed out that there are two mutu- ally exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “ economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppen- heimer termed “the political means” to wealth. It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason and energy in production is the “natural” path for man: the means for his survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coer- cive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law; ANATOMY OF THE STATE 15 it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it. The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also low- ers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or elim- inating the source of his own supply. But not only that; even in the short-run, the predator is acting contrary to his own true nature as a man. We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.4 For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is 4 Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926) pp.

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